working?

So I'm at work kinda not doing much. My computer at home is dead so I'll blame that for the lack of updates.

This was drawn in linux's version of painter

Sheep Egg

Hello blog

Wow nothing new on this blog for like ages. So here's something new.



And here's a link to something made prettier

EXISTENCE HD

You can now read all the text (INTENSE I KNOW).

Could it be a test for a certain other film hmmmmmm?

Sexy Legs

Well what a great weekend. I sent the locked off vision of "Porcelain" to Adrian to begin the soundmix so that meant for the first time in a while (like 5 years) I could have a guilt work free weekend.

So I spent most of my weekend playing Noby Noby boy. I managed to get my world rank up to 178 and I collected all the trophies. Looking forward to see what happens when GIRL reaches the moon.

Of course after too much video gaming I started to feel guilty so I made this



Roseline did this crazy sketch and it made me laugh so I had to animate it.

I hope it makes you laugh as well.

Well now I have Delta Force to watch. I'm pretty sure its going to be awesome just based on the cover.

I've just been listening to the Kill bill soundtrack and I remembered that I wrote this film after seeing the trailer for Kill Bill volume 1. The music and the imagery just forced me to create something. So when I heard the song from that trailer I had to draw an Existence image.

Anyway I threw the film back up here so enjoy it once more. This film does have more than a few links to Porcelain so it is some required watching.

lb shot 36

Well here's a line test for this shot. I'll update my progress as I go.

Here's the original line drawings and how I decided to animate "Porcelain". I thought if I divided up my page like this I could do my pencil animation faster as it meant I couldn't add in too much detail and with this film. You'll also see that I don't trace the previous frame. Occasionally on some shots I did trace but most of the time I just guesstimated in the box this was because I wanted the film to have a sort of hand held look.

My original drawings (which are very rough and loose) were cleaned up by Roseline to keep it reasonably on model. Not so much of an issue for the LB character but very important for the Doll character since the women I draw don't look that pretty.

Ok you'll notice between videos I controlled the line a bit better and made the hair and the collar animate secondary to the body movement. (Well that's the idea I'm not sure if I've got this working yet). I also bumped around the images and lined them up better than the first set. I wanted to show this version before I inbetweened it so you can compare the original keys to the finished keys.

FINALLY I'm uploading the inbetweened animation (blogger kept crashing on me). Ok well a little bit more about this shot is that it happens after LB is waiting at the lights and as this shot progresses the camera looks up towards the building he works at. So yet to come is the background and a few extra characters to fill out the shot.

You'll notice the last few frames aren't animated and he's just sliding that is because the camera will have left him by then. An important thing to learn when there's only you animating it is knowing when not to animate. I've been watching a great piece of animation called "Trava Fist Planet" and that guy (Takeshi Koike) can really animate but he also knows when to do holds and he even has jump cuts within the same shot. He just throws on a popping sound effect to cover the jump. I've seen this done in film before but it works just as well for animation.

When inbetweening I try to just do one inbetween between my keys first to double check my movement and the positions. That last part of LBs walk I really had to move around till I was happy with it. Also I find that if I just work to straight ahead I get fatigued by the end of the shot. So spreading out the drawings and not working too linearly I can keep a good energy throughout the shot. I also take this approach in making a film that I work on the intro then the epilogue and then pick the major scenes to do and now what I'm doing at the moment are the inbetween scenes to tie it together.

How I approach my timing for my animation is that I listen for the movements. Like what sound it would make. If you look at that opening fight in my showreel you'll hear this heavy whooshing sound (underneath all the yelling) this is that sound I listen for when doing my timing. Trusting your ears is a lot better than you eyes or trying to approach it too logically. It's like doing lip sync, If you get the character to lip every letter of the word it will look stupid you only do the mouth shapes for what sound you hear.

Ok like I said there are a few more things to throw at this shot. I'll update when they are done.

7/12/08 7:10pm

Ok here's the background in its raw form for that shot. It's broken down into 6 layers

Foreground buildings
Midground buildings
Bg buildings01
bg buildings 02
sky
ground

This means I can control the depth of field a bit and also gives me more control on where the effects are. I'm working on this at the moment so I'll post up the results tonight sometime.

8/12/08 2:28am

This is the final result.

Porcelain poster art

Here's a promo poster I cooked up for the coming movie. I wanted to make a sort of 80s scifi poster at least what I think is an 80s scifi poster.

The movie will be available online in December. Think of it as a Christmas present to everyone including myself. I'll have to work out the actual bugs of achieving this but so far my tests have been pretty good.

I'll be posting more about this over the next few weeks.

Dang mice

So Rose and I went to the Tasmanian beer festival this weekend. We caught up with some of our work friends there. After we tried some beers we decided the next best thing to do was to go and get a good steak. All was going well until ... well this:

I'll have to see tomorrow who survived but Rose and I are ok.

Rose has even found some time to draw some pretty sweet new pictures. Check them out

Halloween video

So Rose helped me out with this one. Based on a dream I had.

Here's some stills from the video to combat the possible loss with the blogger video

(Facebook viewers you may need to go to my blog to see the video.)
http://merks-art.blogspot.com/2008/10/halloween-video.html

Max facepainter

I spent a little bit of time playing in painter tonight. This is Jamie's "Max Facepuncher".